Invention of Tradition

 "Invention of tradition" is a great term.  It was originally coined by Eric Hobsbawm, to mean a conscious effort to create a vision of the past that will support whatever you are doing (or want to do) in the present.  "We have always done this," or "These are our traditional values" has enormous weight.  If one isn't quite sure what one has always done, or what one's traditional values might be, a little historical research should do the trick, especially if one has a pretty good idea of what is intended to be found.

Hobsbawm focused primarily on Great Britain, where he noted that the people of Scotland in particular pulled together all sorts of elements to identify Scottish identity during the nineteenth century.  For example, the idea that each clan had a distinctive tartan, and that people with certain last names might belong to a clan with a different name and still be entitled to wear its tartan, is no more than 200 years old, even though it was presented as medieval (and surely connected to Robert the Bruce).  The careful identification of the colors and patterns of each distinctive tartan and their assignment to certain groups was in fact a nineteenth-century project.

A Scotland identified by kilts and bagpipes was also a Scotland of sturdy folks, full of heroism and wholesome country values.  Something similar happened in Switzerland.  In the nineteenth century a country that had been seen as made up of rather backward, dirty and uneducated mountain folks, living snuggled up to their cows, set out to reinvent itself.  In the late Middle Ages, Switzerland had fought to free itself from rule by Austria.  William Tell was one of the legendary war leaders.  William Tell became in the nineteenth century a great national hero, standing strong against Austrian tyranny, worthy of having an opera written about him (older people today still think of that opera's overture as "Lone Ranger" music).  The "shoot an apple off someone's head" story if a bawdlerized version of the legend.

Besides William Tell, the other great hero of nineteenth-century Swiss reinvention was Heidi.  I loved the book Heidi as a child and must have read it a dozen times or more.  I cried when I realized that in the book Heidi had curly black hair, which I do not have (in movie versions she's always blonde).  Little did I realize that the idealized world of life in the Alps that the book portrayed was intended to combat the image of dirty Swiss who were almost cows (or goats) themselves.  Heidi thrives under the care of her goat-keeping and loving grandfather, goes to school to get a good education, and, as her greatest triumph, heals a sickly Austrian girl by bringing her to the pure air and food of the Alps.  (Take that, imperial Austria!)

Switzerland completed its transformation from dirty backwater to highpoint of wholesome country values during the twentieth century, especially with the spread of downhill skiing.  Sure, other countries have mountains, even Alps, but the Swiss led the way with resorts, ski lifts, and the like.  Swiss hotels are aggressively clean, even the simplest.  As a Portuguese restaurant keeper, living and working in Switzerland, once told me, if anyone ever suspected his food was not the purest and freshest, it would be, at once, back to Portugal.

The Middle Ages is often chosen as the source of the tradition that someone wants to invent.  For example, modern white nationalists have seized upon a very poorly understood vision of Anglo-Saxon England as the basis of what they want to do, as I have discussed earlier.  The Middle Ages is a popular choice to base origin myths because it is when Europe's countries first took on something like the borders and languages they have today, and (I fear) because, especially in the US, it is so little studied.

"There were three orders of society! The church told everybody what to think and believe! Kings were absolute! Women had no rights! Everyone lived under feudalism!" This is about what even well educated people may tell you about the Middle Ages (clearly not the people who've been reading this blog, if you still think so, go back and read it again).  "Since we know almost nothing about those thousand years, it can mean whatever we want!"

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on society during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Global Middle Ages part 2

 In my previous post I discussed the idea of the Global Middle Ages, a fairly new aspect of the study of medieval history, taken up in part to counter the white nationalists who want to see the Middle Ages as a model for a contained, all-white, all-Christian society, because in fact the Middle Ages wasn't like that.  Today I want to continue that discussion.

As well as interacting with people outside of western Europe, especially through trade, medieval people recognized a large range of diversity at home.  For one thing, they were not all Christian.  Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes amicably, sometimes not, all around the Mediterranean.  There were Jews in most medieval cities, making the loans that ensured commercial development when Christian lenders wouldn't.

And Christianity itself had enormous variation, from differences like Scandinavians sometimes drinking beer instead of wine for the Eucharist, to outright heresy.  Even if there was general agreement on theology and liturgy, churchmen and secular rulers always differed on who ought to be in charge.  The Holy Roman emperors spent much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at war with the popes.  And there were always doubters.

Skin color was not as big a concern in a primarily Caucasian population as it is in modern Western countries, but there were always what we would call "brown" people in the mix.  Outright Blacks were rare, to the extent that a mating between a White and a Black was imagined to produce someone spotted black and white, like a cow.  A Black person was intriguing.

But there is more to trying to make the Middle Ages global that recognizing that it was not a uniformly white, Christian era.  Recently scholars have also tried looking again at the chronology that western historians take for granted.  First there was antiquity, the story goes, then around 500 the Middle Ages begin, to end around 1500, leading to the "early modern" period, then the French Revolution and American Revolution (we adopted our Constitution in 1789, same year as the French Revolution), and we're into Modern.

You can see where this is going.  Modern is good!  Like us!  The early modern period was preparing for us!  The Middle Ages were that time in the middle, after antiquity (from which we can get Greek democracy, Roman law, and early Christianity), before modernity sets in, a dull middle period "best forgotten."  Pretty clear why medievalists aren't happy with this.

Historians (of whatever place and time) need to avoid teleology, that is looking at the past as only interesting if it leads to what we like in the present.  So one might look at the English Parliament as an example of representative democracy, which is good, and leave out the tidbit that it originally only met if called by the king (kings of course being bad).

Looking at the Middle Ages, or for that matter any historical period, teleologically, as leading to us, ignores all the different modernities of different modern countries.  Global studies helps shake us out of that.  While Columbus and Martin Luther, on either side of the year 1500, were obviously crucial to Europe, with new continents to conquer and the rise of Protestantism, 1500 is a pretty meaningless date for most of Asia and Africa.  For that matter, though South America quickly felt the impact of Columbus, North America really did not for another century.

The planet is too big and has too many different cultures to be able to study the whole thing properly.  But by not taking our historical periods and our dates as obvious and absolute (even "the year 1500" is predicated on being able to date the birth of a Jewish boy who grew up to be considered a trouble maker), we can make fewer assumptions about what was important about our ancestors (both biological and institutional).

History done right helps human understanding.  The Middle Ages (as we're stuck calling it) was full of people both like and very unlike us.  Thus we can practice understanding people by starting with medieval people, before branching out to those with very different histories.

Yes, many medieval institutions led to ours, including representative democracy and the legal profession and banking and universities.  Many of the other things that concerned them have no modern analogues.  We'll understand these ancestors better if we don't start with the assumption that they were the embodiment of what the white nationalists today would like to be.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Were medieval people white nationalists?

 Short answer: No.

As I have discussed earlier, medieval people were not advocates of "whiteness."  Sure, they were intolerant of religious difference, especially of Christian heretics, but skin color was well down the list of things they would get upset about.  This has not stopped a lot of people recently from trying to claim the Middle Ages as some golden age of white nationalism.  As a medievalist, I must object to their careless and a-historical use of medieval ideas and symbols.

One of the more recent efforts is to talk about the US as a land where "Anglo-Saxon" values should predominate.  But what is meant exactly by Anglo-Saxon?  The Saxons, from Saxony in northern Germany (hence the name), were raiders and attackers in late Roman Britain.  At that time you had Germanic peoples moving into Great Britain as the Romans pulled out, setting up their own kingdoms.  They called themselves English (England is named for them).  Only really in the nineteenth century did "Anglo-Saxon" become a collective name for these people who made England their own.

And what "values" did they have?  Well, they were ruled by kings.  The US hasn't had kings since 1776, and I hope we aren't going back.  For the first century after Angles and Saxons arrived, they weren't Christian, yet those who now want us to adopt Anglo-Saxon values also want to impose their version of Christian values.  (Protestant!  Obvious heretics by medieval standards.)  They had slavery, gone in the US for 150 years.  British scholars see Anglo-Saxons as part of the German wave that led (supposedly) to the Fall of the Roman Empire.  (And aren't we of the US supposed to be the reincarnation of Rome?  Minus slavery and imperialism and patriarchy and, well, never mind.)

At any rate, medieval society was not uniformly white and Christian.  Trade with other parts of the world continued throughout the Middle Ages.  Silk from China and spices from southeast Asia ended up in the Mediterranean, as did traders from those places.  For that matter, the Mediterranean was predominantly Muslim.  The Middle East was always of interest to medieval Christians, as site of the Holy Land.  Every city of any size had a Jewish population, tolerated during the early Middle Ages, regarded with increasing suspicion in the eleventh and later centuries, but still very much part of society—kings of both France and England relied on Jews as a source of loans.

For that matter, medieval people would not have struck us as "nationalistic."  The areas that a king considered part of his kingdom might or might not have agreed they were under him.  People identified themselves by culture and language by not necessarily by geographic boundaries.  The French epics talked about how "the French" were brave and honorable, but that was a cultural marker, not a geographic one.  People identified much more with their city or county than with their country.  The word nation (natio in Latin) meant something closer to family than country.  The Jews were considered a nation, no matter where they lived.

Medievalists get irritated when modern people try to appropriate  some medieval symbols and use them in ways medieval people would have rejected.  For example, Norse runes and Celtic symbols are sometimes mixed together as some sort of symbol of whiteness.  Well, the Vikings and the Celts were both fair-skinned.  But the Celts of the British Isles, the people who had been there before the Romans and who persisted after the English arrived (especially in the areas now called Wales and Scotland, plus of course Ireland), were attacked by the Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries.  They would not have agreed that one could mix and match their symbols.  For that matter, the Normans of what is now France were only a few generations from Viking settlers, Vikings who had treated Christian churches as their rightful prey.

In the nineteenth century a lot of men's social groups decided they were really knights.  Some members of the Ku Klux Klan declared they were knights, "defending" their "way of life" which apparently was a way of life of prejudice and cruelty.  Knights really first appeared as a group at the beginning of the eleventh century, being persuaded by swear mighty oaths not to harm the weak.  Burning a cross on a terrified family's lawn hardly counts as not harming the weak.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.